What makes addressing a wellness culture or attitude different from other event based themes?
Wellness is values-based. It is a personal action, not just a work culture. This means instead of adding a variety of different wellness offerings to an events rundown, it creates a shift in the attitudes and enjoyment of an attendees time spent at the event. It adds value to your business and helps aid positive attitudes to your work agendas.
It’s a value that’s also not going away. Wellness is essentially underpinning future work standards, with every decision is held to:
Is this good for the attendees?
How does this affect the wellness of the people attending the event?
So how can you help engage your events in this way of thinking.
1.Suggest Offline Time to Increase Focus
This first tactic is probably the most popular solution to creating a wellness attitude to a meeting. Requiring delegates to switch off phones and setting Offline times during the day is a good way to divide their attention and keeping brains engaged. Its shown that reducing screen time has been linked to better quality sleep, lower BMI, reduced stress levels and an improved focus. These benefits out way the need to check a text message or email during a meeting session,. where attention should be on the agenda in hand.
You could require it for certain brainstorm sessions or even a mindfulness morning, taking the burden away from delegates to action, as this is often the hardest thing to do, switch off.
The added bonus to this is it will result in stronger bonds between co workers or delegates due to time spent discussing or engaging with each other, rather than online engagement.
2.Schedule Breaks for Effective Program Planning
Scheduling in breaks for networking and connections with other attendees, or to check in with the office and keep stress levels in check is necessary because people are individuals with personal needs as well as social creatures with collective needs and desires to be together.
Changing the culture, moving past experiences, and embracing a culture of wellness brings value to lives. This is more than a session or two. It needs to permeate the entire atmosphere of the event with decisions made about the event weighed against the idea of promoting wellness among participants and the event team. This includes areas of event design, flow, schedule, use of elements and senses etc.
While the event organiser can’t force guests to get plenty of rest before an even, , they can keep scheduled events in the evening down to a minimum and have at least one day where sessions begin later. This facilitates attendees getting more rest. Having breaks in the day can help them attend to responsibilities that might otherwise pile up at the end of the day, effectively healthily sleep. It will ensure notes are taken correctly, follow ups raised from questions are completed back at the office and focus is given on the days agenda. Having an attendee aware of their energy levels, knowing when breaks are and able to take these is important. It ensures they feel comfortable enough in there environment to explore the "meetings surroundings", in this case the days agenda and idea generation.
3. Give Back To The Hosted City Or Community.
By making a difference and doing some good in the local community, attendees will walk away from the meeting satisfied that they contributed and stepped outside of themselves. Studies show that when people give back they are likely to become a loyal customer. Enabling attendees to do this will give them an opportunity to push there own limits, in a positive way.
We see it in the consumers market. 84% of customers agree that brands have a responsibility to make the world a better place. And that feeling is starting to be a major factor in why organizations incorporate a corporate social responsibility (CSR) experience into their values, meetings and responsibilities.
Conclusion
Having offline time, offering breaks as often as possible and sewing back into a community are all effective ways to enable to grow and maintain a well-being mentality at hosted events.
Whether its a large conference or a small meeting taking place, wellness is a important factor developing in many of the minds of today's workforce.
